This was an Oswald Chambers quote from his daily devotional, "My Utmost for His Highest." You can read the whole thing at the link. The quote popped up from a post I made a year ago, and I thought it would be a great thing to illustrate. While you can't tell it from below, the window was a last-second addition because I thought it needed something in that area. Then I added the shadow to imply the action of prayer leaving the room. One thing I would have liked to do also would have been to put a stark yellow highlight out from the windows across the bed. Maybe I'll go back and add it to just see if it looked right, but most likely I'll just leave it alone and go on to the next one. 

I also added a color overlay, because the original was way too bright. I think it worked well. Though it did mute the contrast a lot, it made the room look like it was in twilight, which I liked. 

Ok, I said I probably wouldn't, but here it is. I added the yellow highlight. Still not sure which I like better. 

This one is interesting. I came up with idea after reading in Philippians back in December. I doodled two different ideas trying to get the idea of how decreasing self would increase spiritual rewards and intimacy. The problem is that they were too complicated. So I shelved it. Then, nearly two months later, just out of nowhere, I got this idea. It's not quite the depiction of a gradual process, like sand coming out, it's more direct: Drop the suitcases or you can't climb. (You can see one more idea in the scratched out part on the right images: Climbing a hill with a big burden of self, but the burden is leaking sand. Still too hard to tell what's going on.) I'm still really struggling with color and backgrounds, so the final drawing ended up being much more simple that some iterations (I had one with an industrial city-scape in the background). But it gets the idea across, and that's the important part. Also, the top is highly paraphrased from a sermon that was preached at my church. You can see from the left picture below that it's even more paraphrased now that it was when I first jotted it down, mainly for space reasons. 

This one popped into my head on Sunday after I read Nehemiah 9:17, so I jotted down a quick sketch of the rabbit and snail on the back of a bulletin. This evening (Tuesday) cranked it out in one evening. The whole thing was probably less than two hours, and a chunk of that was figuring out where to put the text. I really love this verse. It shows the character of God in living color.
In retrospect, I probably would use signs instead of banners for the "finish lines" and I wouldn't have the grass overlap the track, but it is what it is. 

My favorite part of this is that my 8-year-old son walked up while I was drawing it and said, "Hey, that's Psalm 103:8," and then proceeded to quote the verse to me: "The Lord is merciful and gracious, Slow to anger, and abounding in mercy." Well, not quite the same reference I was using, but I was still a proud papa. 

This one started out a sketch on a piece of paper. I bumped the contrast and printed it on A4, then light-boxed it, because I didn't have access to my computer then. I inked it after tracing, then when I got back home, I scanned the inked drawing. I made a few changes, like pinching the bottom of the castles to make the match the perspective a little better. The dark castle stayed pretty much the same, but the castle of light went through a few revisions. My wife thought that the original looked a little to orthodox (good guess, the dome was inspired by the Hagia Sophia), and the I tried a classic wooden church, but it looked really out of place. I finally settled on something a little more cathedral-like, but not super fancy. I spend a lot of time trying to hand-letter the verse. Not super excited about the results, but I wasn't sure how to manipulate the font into a curve like I did by hand. The cross was a last-second addition, which I felt really tied the picture together and put the mechanism for our new citizenship front and center.